Make building workflows easier

I have been using Nintex for over two years on my current project and it has greatly increased the speed to deliver simple and complex workflows to implement business process. We use the webservice to publish workflows based on the Nintex nwf files to build repeatable solutions. The support team is quick to respond if you need help and their online site has good documentation and examples.

The best workflow tool for SharePoint - PERIOD.

This is an amazing package. It allows completely code-free control over SharePoint workflow. If you have any experience using the Visual Studio interface to program SharePoint, you will appreciate just how complex SharePoint workflow coding can be, and Nintex Workflow for SharePoint eliminates this complexity. The product itself can appear quite complex at first, because it has a huge array of elements available to define custom workflows. But once you've been introduced to the basics, it's really quite straightforward. The product is elegantly designed and deeply integrated with SharePoint. My only reservation is with the pricing - licensing can be expensive. But the value is substantial.

Performs as advertised...Good stuff...However

Nintex installs, and sets up very easily. Their documentation and support is good. Overall my experience has been very good.

The previous review talked about how the end users can do all sorts of sophisticated workflows with this thing...Well yes...To a point. It might be my user-base, but there are some pretty abstract concepts that many of my folks are just not trained to handle. Things such as posting variables, regular expressions, and so forth are just unavoidable for anything of any consequence. As a result, I often find myself involved or designing the workflow myself.

That being said, the speed at which I can put it together and deploy it is about 500% faster than if I were to do it in SPD. If you have a tech-savvy crowd, the claims of anyone can do it are true. My users are regular business users, and although certainly not stupid, their just not accustomed to thinking in programmaticly logical terms...It's not plug and play from that perspective.

It's still a good investment. If you are looking at getting into workflow in your sharepoint environment, I whole heartedly recommend this product. just a word of warning...as the admin/dev in our sharepoint environment, I am not "off the hook" as some of the language around this product would suggest...

Product Reviews

Pros

Easy to use interface
Exposes functionality normally reserved for SPD users to non-techs
Cuts development time down dramaticly

Cons

More a product of the workflow foundation, but has trouble with "Wait For"
Wouldn't trust with "Mission Critical" tasks

Regarding Nintex workflows

Overall I give 4 star as rating and I recommend that IT services consulting companies who want to execute their Notes to SharePoint migrations swiftly, need to buy this suite for faster execution and customer satisfaction.

Product Reviews

Pros

a. I will give a 4 star to the product. I use it almost everyday for my workflow applications alongwith InfoPath 2007 and SharePoint 2007.

Its been a wonderfull experience using this workflow suite and I have made complex State Machine workflows in the matter of hours. The learning curve is really less and an average person with limited IQ can start working on this and specialize.

c. So fascinated by Nintex workflows, I have written a 2 part series on integrating InfoPath and Nintex workflows together,

Nintex Workflow for SharePoint 2007

I would recommend Nintex, but I wouldn't recommend buying their extended support. Definitely not worth the money.

Product Reviews

Pros

Users can easily make workflows with little IT support if the workflows aren't complicated. The GUI interface is so much better than SharePoint Designer and much less complicated than Visual Studio.

For fairly simple workflows, it is fantastic.

Cons

On the complicated items (using the web service, querying LDAP or manipulating data from any of those queries, there isn't detailed documentation.

When there is an issue, support is slow, doesn't follow up and then does now more than saying "put in a pause" or if you have pauses, they say "take out the pauses", but eventually you either stop using that particular thing or figure it out yourself. Don't count on their support at all.

Nintex features, migration and what you should know

Working with the Territory Manager has been quite difficult. We had to deploy our deployment due to server issues, but had the migration keys already. Even though we have a software assurance package and only needed 2 more weeks, they asked us to pay an extra $2300 to extend the temporary license for another 2 weeks. We chose not to extend the temporary license, and simply move over to the new keys, but they're still asking for more money. The functionality we receive for the price -- not worth it.

Product Reviews

Pros

Nintex tool itself is acceptable for business users; visual, easy to set up.

Cons

The tool itself is not for advanced users. Developers get frustrated with using it because of all the workaround that are needed to accomplish simple actions.
Additionally, if you are planning on migrating from SharePoint 2010 to 2013, watch out. The company is quite adamant about not providing migration licenses past 15 days AND make any transition incredibly difficult.

Powerful Tool, but not the right fit for some...

All in all it's a great product if you want something to improve the User Interfaces of standard Workflows in SharePoint.

Product Reviews

Pros

As a Whole, the Nintex product is a big leap from the workflows built into SharePoint 2010 and 2013. The improvements lie within the UI to create an easier method of creating Workflows.

Cons

Nintex is essentially an overlay of the SharePoint workflow model. Under the surface, the nuts and bolts are still the same. In our situation. we needed an enterprise wide solution that required workflows in other SQL based systems. Connecting them to SharePoint was too cumbersome, so we needed to go for an external engine that could cover both levels and chose K2.

I love Nintex Workflow

If you want to give your SharePoint power users the ability to create workflows without (or even with) the use of SharePoint Designer then Nintex Workflow 2007 is the workflow tool to use.

What surprised me was the fact how relatively easy it is to create quite complex workflows using the webbased workflow designer of Nintex.

Most of the time I’ve been using workflows within SharePoint in combination with InfoPath forms. One the biggest issues I’ve had in the past was the whole task-driven way approach where there was no real information about the form you are approving.

So what does Nintex does? You probably wouldn’t have guessed it but it completely eliminates almost all the issues I had using SPD! ;)

Another key thing is that customers don’t need developers anymore to create this kind of workflows using Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer but instead the power now lies in the business where people can create their own workflows. Maybe this last statement is a little bit over exaggerated but you get the idea. But maintaining a Nintex workflow is much more easier and better to understand for the end-user then a SPD workflow is.

Maybe consultants, like us, are needed to setup the initial workflow (together with the creation of forms (InfoPath or SharePoint Lists). But then with a simple guidance (check out the excellent tutorials at the Connect site of Nintex) and training, the power users can create/maintain workflows themselves and thus save your IT department a lot of money and time. The time that was once needed to complete a single SPD workflow, which btw is not very DTAP-able (Development, Test, Acceptance, Production) can now be used to complete multiple Nintex workflows which are (in a way (using the Import and Export functionality) DTAP-able). I’m still investigating if there is a way of adding Nintex workflows in a SharePoint solution so it can be part of a real SharePoint solution :)

I haven’t looked in the SDK yet but it is possible to add custom actions as it is for SPD, so don’t worry that your beautifully crafted custom actions are not available anymore when you start using Nintex. You only need to make it available in Nintex, so some extra steps are required (for creating the dialogs, validation, etc).